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Book Club Author Suggestion: Maggie O’Farrell

"I think the books we read when we’re young are the books that stay with us forever. They’re the ones that inhabit our bones." — Maggie O’Farrell

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Brief Bio:

Maggie O’Farrell (born May 27, 1972, in Coleraine, Northern Ireland) is a celebrated contemporary novelist and memoirist known for her exquisite prose, psychological depth, and ability to weave intricate emotional landscapes. Often focusing on family secrets, the complexities of motherhood, and the lingering echoes of the past, O’Farrell has established herself as one of the most compelling voices in modern British and Irish literature.

Growing up in Wales and Scotland, O’Farrell’s childhood was marked by a severe bout of encephalitis at age eight—an experience that left her bedridden for nearly a year and profoundly shaped her internal world and later her writing. She worked as a journalist in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor for The Independent on Sunday before making her literary debut with After You’d Gone in 2000. Her work has since won numerous accolades, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Costa Book Award, transitioning seamlessly from contemporary dramas to meticulously researched historical fiction.

Available Works in the Book Club Resource

The Book Club Resource has copies of the titles below available for reading groups. The descriptions below are taken from Amazon.com.

Hamnet (2020) | Discussion Questions

Cover art for Hamnet

England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on.

A young Latin tutor—penniless and bullied by a violent father—falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is just taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.

Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

The Marriage Portrait (2022) | Discussion Questions

Cover art for The Marriage Portrait

Florence, the 1550s. Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke, is comfortable with her obscure place in the palazzo: free to wonder at its treasures, observe its clandestine workings, and devote herself to her own artistic pursuits. But when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding to the ruler of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, Lucrezia is thrust unwittingly into the limelight: the duke is quick to request her hand in marriage, and her father just as quick to accept on her behalf.
 
Having barely left girlhood behind, Lucrezia must now enter an unfamiliar court whose customs are opaque and where her arrival is not universally welcomed. Perhaps most mystifying of all is her new husband himself, Alfonso. Is he the playful sophisticate he appeared to be before their wedding, the aesthete happiest in the company of artists and musicians, or the ruthless politician before whom even his formidable sisters seem to tremble?
 
As Lucrezia sits in constricting finery for a painting intended to preserve her image for centuries to come, one thing becomes worryingly clear. In the court’s eyes, she has one duty: to provide the heir who will shore up the future of the Ferranese dynasty. Until then, for all of her rank and nobility, the new duchess’s future hangs entirely in the balance.
 
Full of the beauty and emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell turns her talents to Renaissance Italy in an extraordinary portrait of a resilient young woman’s battle for her very survival.

Quotations:

  • “We are all the products of our pasts, but we don’t have to be the victims of them.”
  • “The things we don’t say are often more important than the things we do.”
  • “I wanted to give a voice to the person who had been silenced by history.”
  • “Writing for me is a way of trying to understand what it is to be human, and how we survive the things that happen to us.”
  • “Grief is not a straight line; it’s a circle that you keep walking around.”

Notable Facts:

  • O’Farrell was inspired to write Hamnet because she felt the boy’s death had been relegated to a mere footnote in literary history, despite the play Hamlet being written only four years after he died.
  • Her struggle with encephalitis as a child left her with a permanent tremor in her hands, which she says has influenced her perspective on the physical vulnerability of the human body.
  • Hamnet was a massive critical success, winning the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
  • While she is now famous for historical fiction, her first six novels were all contemporary, proving her versatility across different eras and styles.
  • She often writes about “vanishing” people—those who are physically present but emotionally absent, or those who disappear from their own lives.

Videos/Interviews:

Sources:

Book club sets are circulated to participating libraries via the CLiC courier. Read all about the program on the Book Club Resource landing page. If you are interested in receiving book club sets but are not already a member library, use the online form to get signed up.

Since the BCR has always relied on book donations, we are deeply grateful to all of the institutions and individuals that have donated sets and helped make the collection stronger. Please contact [email protected] for questions or to discuss donations.

Regan Harper
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